• dr seuss -- stole from Helen Palmer, his wife
• paul klee -- stole from Hilma af Klint
• andy warhol -- stole from Hilma af Klint and Yayoi Kusama
• albert einstein -- stole from Milena Maric, his wife
• cy twombly -- stole from Hilma af Klint
• hayao miyazaki -- stole from Akemi Ota, his wife
• leo tolstoy -- stole from Sophia Tolstoy, his wife
• otto struve + henry norris-russell + ejnar hertzsprung -- stole from Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
• pablo picasso -- stole from Baya Mahieddine
• pappus -- stole from Pandrosion
• tycho brahe -- stole from Sophia Brahe, his sister
• johannes hevelius -- stole from Elisabeth Catherina Koopmann-Hevelius, his wife
• jacob berzelius -- stole from Anna Sundstrom
• henri matisse -- stole from Baya Mahieddine
• george lucas -- stole from Marcia Lucas, his wife
• f scott fitzgerald -- stole from Zelda Fitzgerald, his wife
• john steinbeck -- stole from Sanora Babb
• karl marx -- stole from Jenny von Westphalen, his wife
• watson and crick -- stole from Rosalind Franklin
• piet mondrian -- stole from Marlow Moss
• jackson pollock -- stole from Janet Sobel
• wolfgang amadeus mozart -- stole from Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart, his sister
• felix mendelssohn -- stole from Fanny Mendelssohn, his sister

1. dr seuss: Helen Palmer "gave him his life's direction". his output during the most prolific decade of his career was "heavily dependent on the tireless editorial advice and encouragement of his wife, Helen" who was herself a writer of children's books. (https://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/23/books/the-man-who-invented-the-cat-in-the-hat.html).
2. paul klee, andy warhol, cy twombly, wassily kandinsky (who i didn't add but should've): Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) created her first, hence the first, abstract painting in 1906. she met rudolf steiner in 1908, who was unimpressed with her work but kept photos of it. he then showed those photos to kandinsky, who had not yet begun abstract painting and was almost certainly influenced by her work when developing his own abstract painting path. kandinsky, if you didn't know, is the man who had the audacity to claim that he created the first abstract painting in 1911. her abstract work was exhibited only once during her lifetime, a small showing in london in 1928. the first full showing of her abstract work in 1986 in LA is what kicked off her international recognition. (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/oct/06/hilma-af-klint-abstract-art-beyond-the-visible-film-documentary, https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-27-spring-2013/first-abstract-artist-and-its-not-kandinsky) "In 1944, three great pioneers of abstract art died: Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and af Klint. Kandinsky claimed to have created the first abstract painting in 1911. And when in 2012 New York’s Museum of Modern Art staged their show Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925, Af Klint was not even included as a footnote. And yet, as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zweitung art critic Julia Voss argues in the film, the Swedish artist had the jump on Kandinsky by five years in producing the first abstract painting in 1906. For her film, Dyrschka contracted MoMA to find out why Af Klint had been erased from art history and was told “they weren’t so sure Hilma af Klint’s art worked as abstract art. After all, she hadn’t exhibited in her lifetime so how could one tell?” In the film, Dyrschka tries to answer that question by juxtaposing paintings by Af Klint with those of famous 20th-century male artists. Her golden square from 1916 is placed alongside a similar image by Josef Albers from 1971; her automatic writing doodles from 1896 are pitted against Cy Twombly's 1967 squiggles. They make the rhetorical point strongly: whatever the men were doing, af Klint had probably done it first." These side-by-side comparisons are available in this post. https://www.tumblr.com/podcactuses/719955771571519488?source=share. Credit to pintoras and theoldlesbianwithcats.
3. andy warhol, claes oldenburg, lucas samaras: their theft of the work of Yayoi Kusama is very well documented since it's in the modern day. (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20180925-yayoi-kusamas-extraordinary-survival-story) "Claes Oldenburg was ‘inspired’ by her fabric phallic couch to start creating the soft sculpture for which he would become world famous, while Andy Warhol would copy her innovative idea of creating repeated images of the sole exhibit in her One Thousand Boats installation for his Cow Wallpaper. But worse was to come. In 1965 Kusama created the world’s first mirrored-room environment, a precursor to her Infinity Mirror Rooms, at the Castellane Gallery in New York. As man prepared to head for the moon, Kusama had uniquely grasped the public’s growing awareness of infinity. She confronted them with this unnerving concept through a seemingly endless environment. Only a few months later, in a complete change of artistic direction, avant-garde artist Lucas Samaras exhibited his own mirrored installation at the far more prestigious Pace Gallery. Distraught and dejected, Kusama threw herself from the window of her apartment."

• Kansai Noguchi

Kana Tanaka: 'Daydreaming Bubble' (1998)